The paper investigates a continuation-triggered jailbreak in large language models, showing that moving an instruction suffix can markedly boost jailbreak success. By performing mechanistic interpretability at the attention‑head level, the authors reveal that the jailbreak arises from a competition between the model’s natural continuation drive and safety defenses learned during alignment. They introduce Head Competition Steering (HCS), an inference‑time technique that exploits this competition to suppress harmful outputs and distill the approach into a student model for efficient safety improvements.
By Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin
arXiv:2609.26185v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across many applications but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which elicit ha...
By Doniyorkhon Obidov, Honggang Yu, Xiaolong Guo, Kaichen Yang
arXiv:2606. 07963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) are often treated as isolated trigger-response failures, motivating defenses tailored to specific triggers or behaviors.
By Omar Mahmoud, Aly M. Kassem, Thommen George Karimpanal, Buddhika Laknath Semage, Negar Rostamzadeh, Golnoosh Farnadi, Santu Rana
arXiv:2606. 25182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks reveal a persistent weakness in aligned Large Language Models: carefully crafted prompts can elicit policy-violating responses despite safety training.
By Sofiia Nikolenko, Michele Papucci, Mina Rezaei, Shireen Kudukkil Manchingal
arXiv:2605.27110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: In this work, we propose BAIT (Boundary-Aware Iterative Trap), a three-step jailbreak framework that elicits malicious information through in...
By Xuan Luo, Yue Wang, Geng Tu, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu
arXiv:2609.35356v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning can teach language models undesired behaviours alongside desired ones. Inoculation prompting (IP) aims to limit unwanted gen...
By Kajetan Dymkiewicz, Tim Farrelly, Adam Prada, Ishaan Panigrahi, Srishti Gureja, Helen Yannakoudakis, Robert Mullins, Victor Gillioz, Daniel Tan, Maxime Rich\'e